Vae Victis
by Misya
Summary: Rorschach vs. the Twilight Lady. Some Rorschach/Nite Owl subtext. Written 04/03/09.


-1Rorschach makes his way across the rooftops of row houses and tenements, well above the trash and vermin of the Far West Village. It's 1:34 on a Tuesday morning, in the middle of December, and the wind cuts right through him, but the sky is clear and he can see the stars; tiny points of white light, standing out against a vast swathe of black. The world is beautiful, if you don't look down.

He's chosen this route because most of the buildings in the area are squat and densely-packed; keeping to the roofs gives him a decent vantage point, and it's a good way of hiding in plain sight. People rarely glance upwards - they're either watching the pavement to make sure they don't step anything, or scanning the road ahead - and it's inevitable that the Twilight Lady will have her spies posted on the ground below. Rorschach hopes that they'll be too busy watching the shadows, the alleyways, the dark places that the streetlamps don't quite reach; that's where people usually expect to find him. Bogeymen are meant to hide in the dark, not skulk across the rooftops like a malevolent version of Santa Claus.

Rorschach catches himself almost enjoying it.

It's a deceptively quiet night. The last three years have been chaotic; ever since the Underboss and Big Figure were locked away, many people have attempted to take their places, and New York's criminal underworld has been in a state of violent unrest. The Twilight Lady has made her attempt to corner the prostitution market, but things have been going badly for her ever since the King of Skin left the corpse of her best lieutenant hanging from a lamp post. Twenty days ago, four of her girls were killed in a drive-by shooting. The bigger players are trying to scare her off, and it seems to be working. The word is that she's planning on leaving the country within the next few weeks - it seems that she wants to get out while the going is still good - so Rorschach and Nite Owl have been forced to act quickly.

Their objective is to catch the Twilight Lady.

It's been one of her hookers - her bottom girl, no less - who has been supplying Nite Owl with information. They call her Vesper; 'like the bond girl,' Nite Owl says, although Rorschach has no idea what he's talking about. Vesper claims that tonight, the Twilight Lady is going to be meeting with one of her contacts - NYPD captain Nick McLoughlin - with the intention of striking a deal that'll ensure her safety until she can leave New York. Rorschach doesn't trust the whore, but her resentment towards the Twilight Lady seems genuine enough, and Nite Owl always pays his contacts well. He certainly pays Vesper a hell of a lot better than the Twilight Lady does, and Vesper claims that if she gets out of the game, then she's going to go straight. Really.

The Twilight Lady's prostitutes are disillusioned. They say that the money has gone to her head; that she's going to take the money and run rather than stick around and fix her fuck-ups. They no longer feel safe. She had promised them security, and they had believed her, once. Now, though, they know that she's just another finesse pimp. Rorschach is darkly amused by the bitterness of the whores and sodomites. Honor among thieves was always a contradiction in terms.

The Twilight Lady made herself a lot of enemies.

As recently as a year ago, she was holding orgies for New York's wealthier perverts. Now she's been forced to keep a lower profile, sticking to the seedier areas of the city. Vesper gives them her location. The Twilight Lady still has quite a lot of girls out on the track, but her organisation is now looser and more flexible, and she certainly can't afford to run a proper brothel anymore. It would be too much of an easy target.

Rorschach strongly suspects that if they waited a while, they'd see her death in the newspapers within the fortnight. Let the vermin police themselves; there are bigger threats than the Twilight Lady these days. He's told Nite Owl as much, but Nite Owl - the sentimental fool - was adamant that they still try to hand her over to the authorities.

Rorschach knows that the authorities have little to do with justice. Prison is more than the Twilight Lady deserves. If Rorschach had it his way, he wouldn't involve the police at all.

Still; Nite Owl specifically asked for Rorschach's help with the task. Refusing assistance was never an option.

So, Rorschach finds himself jogging above the city in the middle of the night; the temperature is thirty-eight degrees fahrenheit, and he tells himself that he isn't cold. He can see the Twilight Lady's current hideout just up ahead; it's a dilapidated old warehouse on the edge of the Meatpacking district.

He pauses on the roof of a rowhouse, and looks around.

The warehouse is only a single story, but it's a tall one. All the windows are boarded up, like eyes that have scabbed shut. The building almost looks abandoned, but there are a few people milling around one of the personnel doors at the front. Spies and degenerates, the lot of them. Rorschach doesn't look at them too closely; he knows their kind. He just has to worry about the ones that have guns.

Rorschach checks his watch. At It's 1:45, Nite Owl is going to create a distraction.

He drops down from the rowhouse, on to the warehouse's roof, which is completely bare save for a water tower. Rorschach inspects the roof's perimeter, peering over the edge to take stock of the building's doorways. Right at the back is a narrow alleyway, with a fire exit; unsurprisingly, it's guarded. There are three men, and they smoke their cigarettes and talk bullshit amongst themselves, constantly fidgeting as they try to keep warm. Rorschach can't see any weapons, but it's safe to assume that they're armed.

It's ridiculous; if Rorschach was in the Twilight Lady's position - low on resources and running out of options - then he certainly wouldn't leave his thugs out in such a conspicuous place. The Twilight Lady might be an ambitious businesswoman and a glib, charismatic leader, but security was allegedly her dead lieutenant's job, and it doesn't seem like she's managed to find a replacement in the meantime.

Rorschach remembers when she first started operating in New York, and how she had been escorted everywhere by a cadre of leather-clad young men with machine guns. She'd been a viable threat back then.

It's gratifying, he supposes, to see her brought low. It makes him feel something cold and hard in the center of his chest. It's a satisfying sensation, but he doesn't care to linger on it.

He skulks around the roof. There's a loose brick near the water tower's ladder. Rorschach picks it up, and reaches inside his coat to take out one of Nite Owl's flash grenades. And then he returns to the edge, with the guards just below, and he crouches to give himself a smaller profile. Rorschach then waits. Brick in one hand, grenade in the other. He'd make a rather strange-looking gargoyle.

He keeps an eye on his watch.

When the minute hand strikes 1:45, there's a small explosion from somewhere at the front of the building.

Rorschach quickly stands and checks the position of the thugs. Everything is satisfactory. He pulls the pin out of the grenade with his teeth, biting it through his mask, and counts... Then drops the brick on a thug's right shoulder. Rorschach's aim is perfect, because it has to be.

It really would have been more pragmatic to drop the brick on the man's head, but sometimes there are things more important than practicality.

The flash grenade is dropped a split second after.

The brick lands with a distinctive _crunch_, and the man yelps and clutches at his arm. The other two thugs immediately look at him in unison, only to end up facing the flash grenade as it goes off in their faces.

As they reel in shock, Rorschach quickly abseils down using the rope of his grappling gun and lands on one of them, knocking him out cold. Only two left now - one with an injured right arm (and Rorschach hopes to god that the guy isn't left-handed), and another one, who is already drawing a gun, which is rather illogical because he probably still can't see very well. Rorschach quickly calculates the distance between them - there's not enough time to disarm him - so he darts behind the injured thug and grabs his neck in an arm-lock, to use him as a human shield. The man is considerably larger than he is, but Rorschach hangs on like a demon. He feels the man's body shudder as a full clip of bullets tear in to it.

It's too dark for Rorschach to see the shooter's expression, so it isn't clear whether he _knows_ that he's just shot his colleague instead of Rorschach, but there's not really the time to dwell on it. Rorschach shoves the bleeding body at the shooter. The man falls under its weight with a strangled cry of blind panic, and flails, trying to push it off. While he struggles, Rorschach closes the distance between them, and deals a hard kick to the side of the man's head.

Three down.

Rorschach quickly checks himself for injuries, then keeps moving. He feels a little sick. He tries to ignore it - the nausea isn't real, it's just something that exists inside his mind - and he feels a detached sort of frustration as the unpleasant feeling lingers.

He enters the building via the fire door that the thugs were meant to be protecting. It's chaos inside, as it should be. Thanks to Nite Owl's efforts, there's smoke everywhere; it's completely harmless, but the warehouse's occupants don't know that. They're not sure if they're being gassed, or something is on fire, or what, and people always act a little crazy when they can't see further than a few yard in front of them. Rorschach doesn't have that problem; Nite Owl has graciously loaned him a handheld thermal imaging camera, so that he's able to make out the heat signatures of bodies through the smoke. He takes the device out from under his coat; the camera is so crude and bulky that it would probably double as an excellent weapon, although Rorschach suspects that Nite Owl would cry if he broke it.

Rorschach is somewhat familiar with the layout of the building, as Nite Owl has managed to obtain the floor plans for it, and Rorschach knows them from memory. He knows that there's a small cluster of offices to the left of the door he just entered through, and a large open area where rows racking would have once stood.

There's a fight going on, somewhere out of sight; he involuntarily flinches at the sound of a gunshot, and somewhere, a woman screams and a man shouts in pain. Rorschach takes a second to convince himself that the shout isn't Nite Owl's.

He doesn't know for certain where the Twilight Lady's location is. It's a matter of clearing each room. Nite Owl should have the main floor of the warehouse covered, so that leaves Rorschach with the offices. The first door that he kicks open yields nothing more than an empty room. The second yields a room full of very alarmed women - one of them screams and draws a knife on him, although Rorschach isn't quite sure where she manages to draw it from, given that she's only wearing a bra and a pair of high heels - and Rorschach quickly slams the door shut again and steps back in to the cover of the smoke.

Opening the third door reveals a small room. There's a disturbing, pungent smell to it that brings back memories long buried. It's the first thing that Rorschach notices. The second thing he notices is the middle-aged man aiming a gun at the doorway - Captain McLoughlin, he presumes - and, when faced with the business end of a S&W Model 36 (which _isn't_ police issue, he suspects) Rorschach throws the only thing that he has to hand: the thermal imaging camera. It spins through the air and hits McLoughlin right in the middle of his face. McLoughlin yowls and staggers back, clutching his nose; his finger slips on the gun's trigger, blowing a hole in the ceiling. While the plaster rains down, Rorschach darts in and punches McLoughlin unconscious.

McLoughlin isn't alone, though.

The Twilight Lady is watching him with wide eyes as she stands in a corner of the room, poised by an open safe. She's unarmed. Her hands clutch fistfuls of banknotes; it seems that she was busy stuffing them in to the large carpet bag by her feet, but now she's frozen as if rooted to the spot.

Rorschach is on her in a flash, although she doesn't so much as scream as he yanks her arm and handcuffs her to a radiator in one single, savage movement. And then he keeps a hold on her wrist, as the two of them stare and size each other up.

Rorschach eventually decides that it's safe to step away from her. She's no longer a threat.

The Twilight Lady doesn't even bother tugging her hand against the cuffs, as if she knows that there's no point in trying to struggle free. She straightens her posture, and makes a laughable attempt to look dignified. Her attention is still on Rorschach.

He doesn't turn his back on her, but steps back so that he can close the room's door, then crouch by McLoughlin's unconscious body and zip-tie the man's wrists and ankles together.

It's then that he notices that McLoughlin doesn't have any pants on.

Oh. Well.

Mercifully, the Twilight Lady is still (relatively) dressed, although her black body suit doesn't cover up as much flesh as Rorschach would like. She's not a large woman, but she has a certain presence, and her outfit just seems to emphasize the parts of her body that aren't covered by clothing. He opts to watch her out of the corner of his eye.

Somehow, the gun has ended up in the middle of the room, so he paces over to pick it up and pop the cylinder open so that he can tip the bullets out on to the floor. Rorschach doesn't particularly like firearms. They make things too easy and impersonal.

The thermal imaging camera lies nearby. Rorschach takes it and inspects it. There's a hairline crack in the display screen. Nite Owl will not be happy.

Rorschach takes a position just to the left of the doorway, and listens. The Twilight Lady now has her head bowed, so that her hair covers her face.

Nite Owl should be here soon.

Rorschach strains his ears, trying to determine what is going on in the world outside, and it takes him a moment to notice a strange sound; small sobs, like the whimperings of a child.

Rorschach looks over to the Twilight Lady, and he sees that she's crying. At first, it actually takes him by surprise, and then he manages to rationalize it: she's weak. Her facade of bravado has finally cracked. She's weak, just like everybody else. Women always have been more susceptible to emotion.

"Oh god, oh god, please don't arrest me..." Her head is still bowed, but he can see that her mouth has twisted in to an ugly grimace of misery. "I... I never meant for.... I can't believe this is happening. I'm sorry."

It bothers him, and he doesn't quite know why.

"I'm sorry," she says, over and over and over again, like a litany. "Don't give me over to the cops. I'll do anything. I'm so, so sorry. I never meant for... oh god..."

Despite his rationalization of her behaviour, he never quite expected her to react quite like this - although, granted, he's never understood women very well. Something twists inside of him; something like revulsion. Her sobs are small and girlish, and there's a hysterical edge to them. He doesn't know what to do, so he watches her for a few seconds, then has to look away.

It shouldn't be allowed. She shouldn't be allowed to stand there and cry, like an innocent. If she was a man, then he would hit her. It's unpleasantly tempting to hit her anyway, but he remembers the expression of disgust that Nite Owl gave him when he suggested that they leave her to be assassinated. Rorschach remembers it all too well.

Besides, he can't hit her. He's above such things.

Then, the crying stops. Without thinking, Rorschach finds himself turning around to see why she has suddenly fallen silent.

"You liked that, didn't you," says the Twilight Lady, and now her voice is perfectly level. The crocodile tears have made her mascara run, but she smiles at him like a naughty schoolgirl.

Rorschach realises that he's staring at her, and his hands are balled up in to fists. He does not reply.

She grins. "Come on, admit it. I saw you watching. If I'd cried louder, would you have slapped me? No-one would find out if you did."

Now, Rorschach is regarding her with disgust, and she can probably read it from his body language.

"Awwww, honey," she says. "Don't be like that. I know what men want. I guess you could say that it's a gift I've got."

Rorschach is used to people fighting and cursing after they're caught. He's certainly not used to_ this_.

He turns his back on her, and tells himself that her smile is just a mask to hide her fear. He's not sure whether her act of defiance is the product of rigid self-control or outright denial, but it shouldn't matter: the consequences will still be the same.

He's been goaded by better people than her. Rorschach checks his watch, then focuses on watching the doorway again. Where the hell is Nite Owl?

"So, you're the strong and silent type, mmm?" she says - and of course she has to keep talking. He can already see that she's going to be a tiresome creature. "I like that in a man. Especially if he's a good listener, too boot. You seem like a good listener, Rorschach, so I'll let you in on a little secret."

Rorschach removes his hat and shakes the plaster dust off it, boredly. Things seem to have quietened down somewhat outside. He can't hear the sound of fighting any more, just the dejected muttering of the subdued and injured. Somewhere, a man is complaining, 'shot me in the foot, the bastard _shot me_ in the_ foot_...' Most of the warehouse's occupants have probably fled by now, and that's just fine; Rorschach isn't concerned about the small fry.

The Twilight Lady says; "I realised, a long time ago, that people who put on masks are either terribly juvenile, or terribly kinky. Sometimes both. Have you got a little wife back home, wondering where it is that you sneak off to at night?" He sees her out the corner of his vision, looking him up and down. "...No, of course not. Your kind always seem to be bachelors."

He rolls his eyes behind his mask: he expects to hear the usual asinine spiel about how costumed vigilantes are all a bunch of closet cases. People like to do that; they like to corrupt noble intentions, and twist them in to something perverted. It wouldn't be anything that he hasn't heard before. It's repetitive and dull; the _ad hominem_ bleating of bitter liberals and degenerates who want to drag others down to their level.

But instead, she grins knowingly at him, and her silence is somehow more aggravating than anything she could possibly say.

Rorschach replaces his hat, and squares his shoulders.

He's really paying attention to her now, and she knows it. He's aware that this is a bad thing, but there's something about her that draws the eye, and it has nothing to do with the amount of cleavage she's showing.

She's an attractive woman.

No, she isn't.

"Did Nite Owl mention that he fucked me?" she says, out of the blue.

It takes Rorschach a moment to process the statement. (She uses foul language. He hates it when women use foul language.) He turns the words over in his head, weighing and measuring them. "My partner's indiscretions are none of my business," he replies, and then inwardly swears at himself. You never answer questions. It's basic procedure.

But: Night Owl is weak. It's believable. She's not lying.

"Of course," she replies. "I bet you're wondering how it happened."

"You seduced him." Rorschach shrugs, as if that's all there is to it. He's always understood that she and Nite Owl had a history of sorts. That was likely why Nite Owl asked for his help. Rorschach is dispassionate and level-headed; Nite Owl doesn't always know when to leave things well enough alone. Nite Owl probably wanted to avoid arresting her himself, and Rorschach can sort of see why.

She smiles. "It wasn't exactly difficult."

He grunts at her, and checks the thermal imaging camera out of his pocket so that he can make sure it still works. It rattles a bit when he shakes it. Shit.

Rorschach considers gagging the Twilight Lady, but then he'd have to get closer to her.

She keeps talking.

"The last time..." And Rorschach doesn't like that, as it infers that there was more than one instance. "...was about a month ago. He caught me at a party I was hosting, while I was otherwise indisposed. He'd fought his way through my security, yet when he saw me, he didn't quite know where to look. It's funny, isn't it, how some of us can accept violence so easily, but lose our nerve when faced with sex. I can tell that the poor guy doesn't get his rocks off very often, you know? No wonder he's so vicious in a fight."

Rorschach is not listening to her babbling. Unfortunately, Walter_ is_.

"He's so sweet and earnest - sometimes you just want to bend him over a table and make him cry, while other times you want to have him pin you down and fuck you raw. Don't get me wrong, though; the guy's a gentleman. He tries to downplay it, but you can tell that he has the smell of money about him. Makes you wonder what he's doing hanging around people like us, eh? Must have a bit of a savior complex. Or a thing for charity cases. I'm sure there was a bit of a 'rescue the fallen woman' thing going on with him, when he was screwing me. It was... cute; like he's too naive to understand that some of us don't want to be rescued. Or maybe we don't deserve it." She shrugs back at him.

"And why are you telling me this?" Rorschach says.

"Oh, it makes me feel better, and Nite Owl is pretty much the only thing that we both have in common," she replies.

"You've got that right," growls Rorschach, and immediately wishes that he hadn't said anything. Too late. "You can say what you want. It won't change what's going to happen to you."

"Yeah, I know_ that_," she replies. For a split second, her smile looks rather forced, and she licks her lips, glancing away from him. "I'm just glad it's you guys who found me."

"My heart bleeds for you," Rorschach says, flatly.

She gives him an amused look. "Shit happens. Nite Owl's a good guy. I'm sure you'll look after him. In a chaste, platonic, brotherly sort of way."

Alright, now she's mocking him again. He makes an effort to not check his watch.

"I wonder if he'll think of me while jerking off," she muses. "You think he uses his right hand, or his left hand? It's something for me to think about during the long nights by myself, I guess. What sort of sounds he makes. The expression on his face. The way that he slips two fingers inside of him and pretends that they're someone else's-..."

She doesn't finish the sentence. Rorschach has already stormed across the room and hit her hard enough to split her bottom lip.

She staggers, leaning back against the wall for support, and she has the audacity to actually look surprised. For a long moment, she seems to be in shock, and she raises her free hand to her mouth, staring at the blood. "Shit. _Shit._ Owwww."

And then her attention is focused right back on Rorschach again.

Rorschach has to remind himself that she can't see behind his mask. She can't. It's not physically possible.

At the back of his mind, a nagging voice starts up, telling him that it's wrong to hit girls.

But she's hardly a girl.

He could have hit her a lot harder.

The feeling of unease lingers, and it's just not fair.

"So I did manage to get a rise out of you, after all," she says, and Rorschach isn't sure if the cheap double-entendre is deliberate or not. "You want to know his real name?"

No, he doesn't - not from her, _especially_ not from her - but she tells him it anyway. "It's Daniel Dreiberg."

"How did you-..." he begins.

"I may be handcuffed to a radiator now, but I used to be quite the social butterfly before the King of Skin decided that he had a hard-on for making my life difficult." She delicately spits out some blood on to the floor.

And for a moment, Rorschach is just glad that she didn't hear Nite Owl's real name from Nite Owl himself.

All too belatedly, he wonders what else she knows.

Rorschach wants to deal with her. She's too much of a liability. But he doesn't know how he'd explain it afterwards. "If you try to-..."

She interrupts him. People don't interrupt Rorschach very often, so it comes as a bit of a shock when he realises it. "Yes, yes, I know. Don't worry, I won't use the information to hurt him. I have far more dangerous people to worry about than some Dudley Dooright who wants to to slap me on the wrist and put me behind bars. He..."

Rorschach hears footsteps approaching, and holds up a hand to silence her. He marches over to the doorway, and opens it slightly so that he can peer out in to the corridor beyond. There's still smoke everywhere, although worst of it has thinned out by now, and the visibility isn't so bad. Not that it really matters, because Rorschach recognises the sound and cadence of the footsteps long before he can see their creator.

Speak of the devil.

Nite Owl steps in to view. He's uninjured, and that's always good.

"What took you so long?" Rorschach asks him. 

They hang around for long enough to ensure that the police arrive, and quickly leave before the cops can start asking them questions. Nite Owl has some respect for law enforcement, but the feeling isn't always mutual, and Rorschach is convinced that the majority of police officers are irredeemably corrupt. (He tells Daniel about this. Often. One day, Nite Owl is going to listen.)

It transpires that the raid on the Twilight Lady's base is very productive. Along with a sizeable stash of narcotics (mainly marijuana and amphetamines) and drug-related paraphernalia, the police find more than enough evidence to charge her with pandering, racketeering and tax evasion. They've also got a few things to ask her about a blackmailing scandal that has recently made the life of New York's mayor very uncomfortable - but of course, that bit isn't mentioned in the newspapers. Nite Owl picks up what information he can by snooping on the NYPD, and then he passes the details on to Rorschach, who takes a dry, academic interest in that sort of thing. Rorschach tells him that he's more interested in what happens to Captain McLoughlin, because men who are meant to be upholding the ideals of justice should not be consorting with prostitutes. Nite Owl doesn't argue.

Two weeks later, Rorschach finds a copy of the New York Post on one of the owlship's consoles. The paper has been left open on an article about the Twilight Lady's preliminary hearing, and there's a black and white copy of her mugshot. She doesn't have the dazed, washed-out look that people usually have in booking photos, although her mouth is badly bruised and the split lip is scabbed over. It looks far worse than he remembers it. She must have made it look like that on purpose, in order to generate sympathy, because Rorschach does not recall hitting her that hard. And even if he did, she brought it on herself.

Out of nowhere, he thinks of her handcuffed to the radiator, and then he thinks of her hands on Daniel's...

... Daniel's shoulders.

And then he quickly dispels the mental image.

It doesn't help the that Daniel has been terse and bad tempered towards him since the arrest. The man has been even more easily offended than usual.

Rorschach throws the newspaper out the owlship's personnel hatch - _The New York Post _is a biased gossip rag, although it could always be worse; he could catch Daniel reading _Der Yid_ - and then he tells himself that the Twilight Lady is in jail. She hasn't won.


End file.
